середа, 29 жовтня 2014 р.

Limiting chrome's memory usage per tab

Last two weeks I observed that one of my favorite games - eRepublik, uses abnormally huge amount of memory if you leave chrome for few hours opened. Finally page becomes unrespondable, and you may observe a usage per page near 1-2Gbs of memory. In the example below, my chrome decided to occupy a bit smaller amount of RAM just in 15 minues of site browsing.
Top of my chrome's task manager with "memory leak" 
Indeed, such situation didn't make happy neither me nor other people around the world. Some of them suggested, they would like to have a possibility to limit chrome's memory usage. Indeed, the reason for such strange behaviour is caused by design in chrome, that keeps in memory major part of elements for given tab, until you change website. I perfectly understand Googlers' desire to make everything "smoothing" and fast, but indeed present situation looks quite dangerous for some people, that use webpages as their workplace, or if they need to update pages time to time.
Most of the existing solution you may find on the web, provide you with a possibility to limit overall chrome's memory usage by suspending tabs, by "parking" them etc. Yes, in general cases, it helps, cause chrome uses separate process for each tab, so limiting amount of tabs improves overall picture. But in case when one web-page uses extra-and-extra-and-extra memory this is not the solution. Indeed this is not the solution if you need to work with the site, and you don't intend to check old info, but your main purpose is to grab new one. Perfect solution for such situation was if chrome tried to limit its internal memory per page, let's say by 2 or 3 last complete snapshots, but until this, the only possible way is either to close tab with extended memory usage and open new one, or kill it from Chrome's task manager.
The only solution, that solves this problem in the way, described above is python solution at superuser.com. It is a bit old, so I modified it in order to work with python 2.7.8 (that is default on my system) and psutils 2.1.1 (they don't include into python distro, so you should get them by yourself).
It's main feature is it kills ANY tab that overcomes 800 Mb of real memory. You can put your own value if this one is too small for you.
The main disadvantage is it really kills really ANY tab, and some times it kills other tabs assigned with the renderer. So you will loose all your input forms. Therefore I recommend use this script just if you really need such feature. Otherwise, write to Google HQ and ask them to add this feature to browser.
Source code for solution at github.

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